Perlan 2 Flies

Dean Sigler Sustainable Aviation 1 Comment

Perlan 2, the pressurized sailplane destined to attempt flights to the edge of space, made its first test hop Wednesday, September 23 at Redmond, Oregon.  It was towed to 5,000 feet above Redmond Municipal Airport, stayed aloft for about a half-hour, and alighted perfectly under the expert guidance of James (“Jim”) Payne, Chief Pilot for the Airbus-sponsored project.  Morgan Sandercock, Co-pilot and Project Manager, rode the back seat and had a turn at the controls. According to post-flight chat, James and Morgan found things to their liking, with everything, including the huge dive brakes, working as designed and as simulations predicted.  A video crew, on hand to capture the event, used a Bell Jet Ranger helicopter to follow Perlan 2 on tow and through the flight, and on-board cameras captured the release from the towplane and the precise touchdown.  At all times, the varied beauty of central Oregon formed a backdrop to the event. Designed by Greg Cole and built …

Burrito Bombing – A Kinder, Gentler UAV Use

Dean Sigler Electric Powerplants, Sustainable Aviation Leave a Comment

An engineering threesome apparently not finding a sense of accomplishment in their daily routine, have developed an integrated hardware and software system to deliver hot burritos in the time it takes to fly them to a customer. Quadrotors are being tested and used for an amazing range of tasks, including taking medicine and other humanitarian deliverables to remote  villages and finding hostages while providing tactical intelligence to ground forces. The hope of tacos being delivered to San Francisco Bay area residents, as advertised on a web site listing itself as a “private beta” link was busted as a hoax by Christina Bonnington of Wired.   She wrote that TacoCopter was the brainchild of, “Star Simpson, an MIT grad who stumbled into the limelight in 2007 after being arrested for wearing a hoax explosive device comprised of a circuit board and green LEDs.”  This was after 14,000 “likes” on Wired’s Facebook page and 4,000 tweets excited about the possibility of tacos from the sky.  But who …